I’m really excited to welcome so many new people to PoSM Lab this fall! One of my favorite parts of research here is getting to learn alongside people who bring different questions and ways of thinking to the same problem. I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone, helping our new members settle in, and seeing what we can figure out together.
Meet the team
This fall brings new faces alongside returning lab members. Here’s our current student research team:
Recoil simulation
Mechanical redesign
Biomechanical modeling
Material synthesis
We’re working with our amazing mentor and leader, Professor Mark Ilton.
What we’ll be exploring
There is a lot to explore across the lab in the coming months. Our recoil simulation team is working on extracting more precise power and energy estimates from our simulation models, investigating various relaxation modes of the materials, and developing a novel strategy to infer material properties from their recoil and loading behaviors.
Our mechanical redesign team is working on making improvements to the elastodynamic mechanical analyzer, with the goal of making recoil measurements more reliable and repeatable.
Our biomechanical modeling team is working on adding a large-angle model and sanity checks to the latch-mediated spring actuation (LaMSA) model. The team’s ultimate goal is to model a genus of trap-jaw ants and understand how their morphology generates such rapid motion.
Our material synthesis team is working on creating materials with tunable viscoelastic properties.
Having this many people join at once makes the future of PoSM Lab especially exciting. I can’t wait to see how the projects grow as we learn from each other. Welcome, everyone!